A Tragic Honesty (74 page)

Yates called to speak to Gina every Sunday morning, and when Martha answered the phone he'd often try to keep her on the line with solicitous inquiries about one thing and another. She'd respond politely, but if he got too personal or began to wax sentimental she'd cut him off, and Yates would be hurt. Finally, when the exasperated woman informed him she was seeking no-fault divorce in California, Yates wrote a letter expressing a forlorn perplexity toward her refusal to talk things over, begging her to explain once and for all her reasons for leaving him. This she did. “I have gotten the impression you would rather believe your own version of things than hear mine,” she wrote. “I
resent
your request that I be ‘gentle and considerate of my words.' I did that for far too many years at the expense of honesty.” And so, with what must have struck the hurting man as brutal candor (rather than a remarkably temperate elision of specific malfeasances on his part), Martha explained the gist of her grievances:

You're the one who wrote
Revolutionary Road
. You know the torments people go through trying to live out roles, exacting demands from loved ones, secretly longing to be free. But underneath it all I think you don't believe in freedom. It too is a farce in your view. But I always did guiltily long to be free.… Your statement that ‘most women of your age can be presumed to have found, by now, about as much of themselves as there ever was to find' is
ridiculous
to me.… There were many times when I allowed your way of thinking and of seeing things to impose a type of censorship on mine.…

I'm afraid that if I don't emphasize how difficult you were to live with, how exhausting it was trying to please you, understand you, and finally how huge was my resentment at having given myself away for so many years, you will miss the point entirely. So here is that emphasis.

Emphasis or no, Yates went on talking about “Libbers” and “gew-gaws,” and a year later he'd vent his bitterness in the story “A Natural Girl,” which depicts a more benign version of Yates being callously dumped by a simulacrum of Martha. But at some level he knew better, all the more so over time. As Michael Davenport reflects about his young wife, “Sarah was too nice a girl ever to be charged with ‘torturing' a man; he had always known that. Still, she had never been the kind of girl who would collaborate in allowing her future to fall apart, and that was something he'd always known about her, too.”

The divorce was finalized that spring, which momentarily seemed to improve Martha's mood where her ex-husband was concerned. When he wrote asking her, in effect, to remember the good times and all the ways he'd tried to make her happy—enumerating a number of specific material gifts—Martha replied in a way that suggested he wasn't far wrong in assuming she'd been influenced by certain modish ideas. “Does an apple tree give skirts, does a rosebush give shoes, does the sky give watches?” she wrote, imploring Yates to meditate more on things unseen. Specifically she urged him to get psychoanalyzed: “You've always had
so
many voices, but no one to help you interpret them. This would be called dream therapy, or Jungian therapy—ask among your friends. Accept the obvious gifts of your own psyche.”

Whether because of Martha's well-meaning advice, or simply because he needed someone to talk to (even a psychiatrist), Yates subsequently arranged to meet for weekly psychotherapy sessions with the thirty-four-year-old Winthrop Burr at the VA outpatient clinic in Boston. “The nicest thing about me is my stories,” he announced at the outset. In a manner that was generally brusque and detached—he was skeptical as ever that airing his pain to a stranger would serve any useful purpose—Yates spoke of his agonizing loneliness since the breakup of his marriage. He mentioned a few people who begrudged him little bits of their time, but really he had no close friends. Also he lived in constant fear of humiliation: People treated him as a “skid-row figure” because, Yates supposed, he coughed and smoked and looked unwell. (That he was often drunk wasn't emphasized as a factor.) For example, he'd gotten into a number of fights with cabbies who were rude to him; Yates would start yelling and they'd make him get out. Once he tried to meet Sam Lawrence for a drink at the Parker House hotel, but employees wouldn't let him in the door. Tracing the cause of his alienation and its manifold effects, Yates would speak of his mother with a scathing, obsessive hatred that sometimes brought him to the brink of tears.

“There was a lot to admire in Yates,” said Burr. “He evoked feelings of protectiveness in others.” Over the years Yates was occasionally gracious in acknowledging the young psychiatrist's help, though often he was quite the opposite. In retrospect Burr regrets taking him as a patient: “You don't do psychodynamic therapy with people who are drinking. It doesn't help them, and it might make them worse [because] it stirs up emotions that make them
want
to drink.” In the beginning, though, Burr wasn't aware of the extent of his patient's drinking, as Yates was at pains to conceal it; but in due course Burr came to believe that Yates's increasingly frequent breakdowns, indeed any number of woes, were all but entirely caused by alcohol.

*   *   *

Meanwhile a happy incongruity between Yates's life and work continued to obtain. As he intensely reflected on his childhood, both for Burr's benefit and that of
A Good School,
he felt more and more compelled to write about that seminal episode when his mother had been commissioned to sculpt FDR (as well as a cluster of other memories from that time, such as her drunkenly getting into bed with him and puking on his pillow). At first Yates considered working the material into his novel somewhere, but finally decided to put the book aside for a month or so and write a separate, self-contained account. It was a breakthrough for Yates, whose every attempt to write short fiction over the past fifteen years (more than twenty, really, with the single exception of “Builders”) had come to naught. “I was so pleased with the way [“Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired”] turned out,” he told an interviewer, “that I thought I might try to write six others when
A Good School
was over and make a book of them.” Writing stories would also enable him to renew his campaign to breach the walls of
The New Yorker
.

In April, Yates accepted a two-week Visiting Writer stint at Columbia, though in general he was more reluctant than ever to enter a classroom: As always, he was inclined to husband his time and energy for writing, but also the prospect of ridicule and failure had become far more threatening. The Amherst debacle haunted him, and then of course he was morbidly conscious of the way people stared at him on a daily basis, as if he were a curious and disturbing spectacle. “How do I look?” he asked Crossroads owner Michael Brodigan after his ejection from the Parker House. “Is something
wrong
with me?” Even a chance to visit his friend Geoff Clark at Roger Williams was more than he could face at the time: “Thanks for the invitation,” he wrote, “but I'll shy away. Every time I meet one of your classes I make a horse's ass of myself, and that tendency would be rampantly worse if I were given a chance to ‘explain'
The Easter Parade
to a roomful of girls.”

Much more welcome was the chance to resume his mentorly role on a private level with his semi-estranged daughter Monica, who'd switched her college major from chemistry to English—a rather momentous decision. In recent years she'd become vexed by an awareness that
she
was the one most like her father, with all that seemed to portend of potential instability, and hence the pursuit of a science degree had been one way of dodging her fate. Besides, neither parent had ever made much of Yates's writing, which Monica had come to perceive as so much self-indulgent escapism; throughout her childhood she'd told friends he was a “college professor,” which sounded better. Then a fellow student turned out to be an ardent admirer of
Revolutionary Road
—indeed, seemed starstruck at the prospect of meeting the author. And Monica's first creative-writing teacher at the University of Massachusetts was none other than George Cuomo—whose career Yates had helped launch as editor of
Stories for the Sixties
—and Cuomo made it clear that Yates had a very considerable reputation. Only then did Monica read her father's entire oeuvre and realize how good he was, which inspired her to be a writer too. “I'm so incredibly lucky to have you!” she wrote him. “As soon as I finish [a story] I really like, I'll bring it to you—we can talk about everything.…”

And so it came to pass, and for the most part it was good for both. For the next decade or so, among the first things Yates would mention in almost any conversation was the fact that his daughter was a writer, too. It bolstered his self-respect to know that, at least in one sense, he was a good role model; he gave extensive, tactful critiques of her stories (“He figured things out,” she said, “and he was
always
right”), and recommended her best work to Monica McCall, who accepted her namesake as a client. Candidly, though, Yates's misgivings were at least as great as his pride: He considered writing fiction “the hardest and loneliest profession in the world,” and knew only too well the kind of dismal toll such a life could take. And then, truth be known (though he was careful not to labor this point in mixed company), Yates didn't think women were cut out to be serious artists, since such a difficult business interfered with their main function as caregivers. He regarded a handful of female writers as first-rate—Jane Austen, George Eliot, Alice Munro, Gina Berriault, perhaps one or two others—and thought the rest would be better off focusing their energy elsewhere. “Dad thought the best, most fulfilling thing for a woman was to get married and have a family,” said Monica. But meanwhile, in lieu of such a blessed turn of events, he wished her well.

Among his daughters Monica became his closest confidante, the one who understood him best and vice versa, but Gina was his heart. Affectionate, pretty, utterly nonjudgmental where her father was concerned, she was the great solace of his later years; those who knew Yates at his sickest and saddest were struck by the way he'd light up—his color quite literally returning—at the mention of her name: “She was the one he had a crush on,” was how one friend put it. From the beginning they had a breezy rapport. “What's that over your head but not the ceiling?” he'd say to the giggling toddler over the phone.
“Sky
.
”
“What's that under your feet but not the floor?”
“Ground
.
”
Along with the sweetness of Gina's nature, another reason the relationship never soured was distance, which necessarily limited their contact to brief visits two or three times a year. At such intervals Yates was careful to be on his best behavior. “I was told at a very early age that Dad had a drinking problem,” said Gina. “I remember him always having a beer in hand at his apartments and always ordering lots of drinks at restaurants. However, I don't remember him as ever acting particularly disorderly, slurring, or having boozy breath or anything like that.” Her earliest memory of Yates was his visit to California in the summer of 1977, when she was five. In his motel room they made up a game called “mow the meadow”: Yates covered his eyes while Gina went around the room with a carton of cigarettes (a make-believe lawn mower) saying “Mow, mow, mow,”—until Yates opened his eyes and exclaimed, “Oh, what pretty flowers!” “He seemed to enjoy the game as much as I did and had unlimited patience,” Gina recalled, “repeating the same silly thing over and over without getting bored. We both remembered ‘mow the meadow' with fondness over the years.” Meanwhile Yates would discuss the girl's mother only in the most glowing terms, romanticizing her to the point of rendering her all but unrecognizable—e.g., “Your mother was always very athletic”—which, as Gina points out, simply wasn't the case.

Friends noticed how Yates continued to pursue Martha, as it were, in the form of other young women of similar body type—“a dancer's body,” as Robin Metz described it: “lithe, flat-chested, willowy.” Very little is known about a number of these women apart from their first names and whatever else can be gleaned from the odd letter among Yates's papers.
*
Some were students or aspiring writers who admired his work; some were simply impressionable young women at loose ends who were flattered by the attention of a semi-celebrity. For a short while in the fall of 1977, for example, Yates was attached to a woman named Bonnie—a waitress who fancied herself a painter and wrote such remarks as, “I am planning to make a cutely decorated box in which I am going to drop neatly lettered clichés about my life—THE REAL STUFF—for example … ‘If you will it, it's not a dream' (Henry Winkler, ‘The Fonz') because this is all that is keeping me going, keeping me painting everyday.” Bonnie had a girlfriend named Tommie, whom Yates also briefly pursued until she moved that spring to New Orleans, whence she wrote him a note commending his “gentle passion.”

Yates's cohort in this occasional Arcadia was Andre Dubus, who expected “salvation not mere pussy” from very young women and kept an apt Fitzgerald quote (from a letter to his daughter) tacked on his wall: “You've heard me say before that I think the faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.” Yates would not have disagreed, and in fact was oft given to the rueful reflection that Martha had gone wrong—“got ideas in her head”—around the age of thirty. This, then, was another respect in which he and Dubus were an abiding, if sometimes rivalrous, comfort to each other. Peggy Rambach was a sophomore at Tufts in October 1977, when she met her future husband at the
Boston Globe
book fair; later that day she found herself spliced between him and Yates at a seafood restaurant. “I was nineteen years old,” she recalled, “and both of them were putting the moves on me. It was later a joke between them—that Andre had won me. At the time I guess I was dazzled. Here were two well-known writers paying so much attention to me.”